Friday, 3 September 2010

Skydives, ligaments and bartending

Long time, no blog.

New Zealand is still offering up many delights. The main highlight of recent weeks was going to Rotorua, where much fun was had. This included a skydive from 15,000 feet, white water rafting down a river swelled to nearly five times as high as it usually is, and a zorbing down a hill with a rugby player, which inadvertently strained a ligament in my knee.

So, I may as well get the main thing in early. I did a skydive from 15,000 feet. Here’s a video of it:

And here are some pictures:

Pretty epic, eh? I have to say, I was fully bricking it before hand, as you can probably tell by the unnatural amount of smiling that I was doing.

Another thing that Mitch and I did, before we even got to Rotorua, was go cage diving with sharks. Unfortunately the camera we bought to take pictures of the sharks didn’t work because the mechanism that was meant to wind the film didn’t work properly. But now that has been fixed, and we have a new reel of film, so maybe it’ll get used at some point.

The white water rafting was certainly a lot of fun. Having done it before in Austria, I felt fairly confident about it, and this meant that I got a bit of stick from the lads when we met up with the instructors. The river hat we were rafting on, the Rangatiki (or something like that) usually has a flow level of about 0.9-1.5. I’ve left the units off because they didn’t have units: it was just 1.5, not 1.5 feet or anything like that. When we were getting the boat ready, the bar that showed how high the river was reading 7.0! This, added to the fact that our guide allowed us to do some extra rapids at the beginning which aren’t usually done, meant that we had a very exciting journey down the river.

The last ‘major’ thing we did whilst in Rotorua was Zorbing. This involves going down a hill inside a giant plastic ball, and being thrown about because of changes in direction and speed (and also you jumping around inside the ball). Now, I know it was stupid, but for the final run, Mitch and I decided that we would go down the straight course. In the same ball. At the same time. This presented one major problem for me- Mitch has about 20kg on me, so if a coming together occurred, I would be the person that came off worse. As it happened, we didn’t really smash into each other that much, I half kneed Mitch in the face, but apart from that, nothing major.

It was because nothing major occurred that I was confused as to why my knee hurt so badly when I got out of the Zorbing ball. After seeing a physio, it seems I have strained my Lateral Collateral Ligament, also known as the Fibular Collateral Ligament. It is a fairly minor ligament in your knee that helps to support the knee joint when straightening. I had somehow taken a knock on the side of my knee, which strained it beyond normal, making it extremely tender. Luckily, because it is only a stabilising ligament, I still could walk; it was just that I couldn’t straighten my leg properly. It’s been a couple of weeks since then, and I can now report that my leg is getting better. I can now support my own weight on the leg, and I can straighten it out fully without pain. In fact, the only time it does give me trouble is when I go for physio, and she pokes and prods it!

I guess the final thing that is worth mentioning is the quiz night that occurred last Friday night. One of the houses, Averill, had a parent’s quiz night, and Mitch and I were asked to be the barmen for the evening. It was a pretty fun evening, with the students’ team being badly beaten (but only because the quiz was abiout the 80’s, before any of us were even born!). However, it gave me some experience of working in a bar situation, and allowed Mitch and I to get to know some of the Year 12 lads a bit better.

Aaaaaaaanyway, I think that is basically all there is to say: only minor things like what I do during the day have not been revealed, which is because they usually aren’t that fun to do, and would be even less fun to write and read about.

So I guess that is it for another few weeks. As I might have said in the blog last time, I will usually do one of these blog every few weeks summarising what has happened. It might be, however, that I do a few very short ones with links to pictures and a brief comment on what I’ve done if I think it is worth mentioning.